Developer Update for the Week of May 25, 2024: Namora Edition (30+ Questions)! - Marvel Snap Zone (2024)

Hello all! Welcome back to this week’s breakdown of what’s happening over on theMarvel Snap official Discord! This week, we get answers to questions such as: why did devs stop answering questions, will Cable ever show the card he stole, will the 10 Booster reward ever be changed, and more! If you want to stay up to date with what’s coming and what answers developers have for the community, make sure to check back here each week!

This week’s edition comes after the launch new card Namora! If you don’t know if this card is worth a Spotlight Cache, make sure to check out our weekly Spotlight Cache guide, as well as our Namora Bonus Challenge guide!

Answers and questions may be slightly rephrased for more clarity and ease of reading. This week’s topics will be divided into Card Specific Questions, Other Questions, and Questions From You!

Remember, you can check out our new Marvel Snap Developer Tracker to see all questions and answers in real time! Topics can also be searched, filtered, and sorted.

Card Specific Questions

Q: If U.S. Agent can get a buff, why can’t Man-Thing if they do the same thing?
A: Glenn “While they look similar, the balance elements have differences.

Man-Thing takes 2 Power away from cards whose base Power is often in the 1-5 range, and is played after some targets are already in play. It’s fairly easy to realize a 4-Power gain this way, and a larger percentage of those cards’ relative Power.

US Agent affects larger cards, so to have a similar impact he needs to take away more Power. He also either gets played early, allowing the opponent an option to avoid him, or eats important Energy on later turns in order to surprise the opponent. It can also be rare to see him affect more than one card.

Man-Thing is slightly weaker than US Agent in sum, but it’s closer than it might seem. It’s likely more about having enough decks to prey on and being able to compete with the many strong existing 4-Cost cards and the roles they play. In fact, we would’ve moved him to 4/6 except that the Spectrum deck (which often plays him) is one of the best three decks most weeks, and we avoid buffing decks with metrics like those.”

Q: What Character do devs want to see added to Snap?
A: Glenn “Blink was actually one of mine, as she was the main character in my first comic book. As for characters we don’t yet have, Spider-Punk is up there.”

Q: Why is Agatha so bad at the game?
A: Glenn “Agatha doesn’t have a value system; she chooses her moves randomly from all available options. The interesting challenge in playing her is building a deck where “good” choices are forced.”

Q: Would the team ever let Cable show the card he stole?
A: Glenn “The hidden information is part of the design. A core element of Cable’s creative is that he knows things about the future the X-Men don’t, and the card endeavors to represent that with information asymmetry.

Whether your opponent plays Cable or not, you don’t know if you’ll get to draw a specific card. Ignoring Mill, Cable doesn’t really change that for the affected player; that’s just a perception bias. The only player whose game is meaningfully changed is the Cable player, who can play based on the information gained.”

Q: Why does Negasonic Teenage Warhead trigger after she moves, despite a card not being played in her location? (Such as Magneto getting destroyed after moving NTW to his location)
A: Glenn “Our trigger system is set up such that On Reveals happen before everything, and triggers only look for their ‘event’ when it’s their turn to potentially resolve. We don’t queue up multiple elements every time a card is revealed.

So the order in this case becomes Magneto moves NTW, then NTW makes her check. ‘A card was just played–was it played to my location?’ 💥”

Q: With Werewolf returning to a 3-Cost, could Hit Monkey return to a 2-Cost?
A: Glenn “That would be a significant buff. These cards are additive in strength–that is, a stronger Hit-Monkey often complements Sage and Werewolf rather than replacing one. I don’t expect us to make that change based on current performance anytime soon, because we avoid buffing high-performing decks.”

Q: Could White Tiger see a buff to 9 Power tigers?
A: Glenn “It’s possible we can find a good buff in there, but I don’t expect it’s that one. White Tiger is a card that plays a meaningful role in the new player metagame, so we need to balance it for both.”

Q:What happens at the end of the game if I use Legion on Cancun?
A: Glenn “not much”

Q: Is the Sentry change really a nerf? He now dodges Shang-Chi which feels like a buff.
A: Glenn “The data has demonstrated over time that more Power is more valuable than being vulnerable to Shang-Chi. No card has ever gained win/cube percentage after moving below that line.”

Q: Can you explain how Baron Mordo’s new text works in game? And why did you make this change?
A: Glenn “If Wasp is the top card of your opponent’s deck when you play Baron Mordo, Wasp’s Cost is set to 6. On turn 6, Wasp will resume costing 0. On Reveals don’t trigger multiple times by definition, it’ll only affect the card on top at the time it resolves that ability.

If your goal was explicitly making your opponent’s deck smaller, it’s a nerf–but drawing them cards isn’t the best way to accomplish that goal anyway. If the card costs 6, or if your opponent had Mobius, Baron Mordo was “Your opponent draws a card” which is a pretty weak line of text for a 2/3. When he wasn’t giving them a card they could play, the effect was fairly similar to “Show your opponent the bottom card of their deck.”

I’m confident this version of Baron Mordo is much stronger overall, though it may be worse in a small number of situations.”

Q: If you tried to buff Leech previously as a way for players to combat Hela, why not just nerf Hela instead of buffing a frustrating card?
A: Glenn “As I’ve stated in past replies, Hela’s performance metrics haven’t merited direct action against her. However, we’re sensitive to players who find Hela frustrating wanting a card they could play that would alleviate that feeling of helplessness–that’s a large part of the function of release valves in practice. We thought Leech might be that card here, and it just didn’t work out. That does mean we’ll continue monitoring her closely and look at how we might be able to present a better valve in the future.”

Other Questions

Q: Why haven’t you been answering many questions lately?
A: Stephen “We had our team all hands get together this past week so we were all traveling and spending time in person. Second Dinner is a remote work company so we only get together in person a few times a year. Our response rate will return to normal on Monday”

Q: I was watching videos for tips and i had come across a video summarizing the tweets of Eric Lang and he had many things that were strictly do or do not do things. One example is to not create cards that mess with your energy system or mana or whatever it is for your respective game. It got me wondering what are some of the teams do’s and don’ts? Also bonus question what are your tips for evaluating cards outside of their own personal vacuum before releasing it?
A: Glenn “I think Eric’s an excellent designer, and caveat that I haven’t seen the context so I’m trusting your paraphrasing here. However, as a designer I’m reticent to be strict–especially in the digital space that CCGs continue to grow into where you have so much new potential. I do think such heuristics are useful, especially to new designers. I teach several of my own in a course, but an important one is ‘There’s an exception to every rule.’

There are plenty of things we know to exercise caution around in SNAP: drawing cards, gaining Energy, manipulating the deck, etc. And we’ve learned plenty of things to exercise more caution around than the game has in the past: adding 3 Power, generic strength, destroying cards, etc.

As for a tip: start as strong and exciting as you think might be printable at all–I’m talking like 9.9/10, but not past that mark. If that version of the card isn’t appealing to your playtesters, you can likely just chuck the whole idea and avoid wasting time balancing it.

For example, we playtested the first Supergiant at 1/2 not because we thought 1/2 would likely be the final card, but because 1/2 would let everyone most fully explore the potential of the idea. If 1/2 wasn’t exciting to anyone after that, we would’ve just moved on to a new design.”

Q: Would you ever add a card that protects your hand from effects your opponent causes? Such as Iceman, Spider-Ham, or Leech?
A: Glenn “Probably not? That effect just isn’t strong enough to merit a card. Even if it was a 1-Cost, it would lose to Iceman and Spider-Ham 50% of the time–that’s a high fail rate for a role that’s already incredibly niche. It wouldn’t be able to justify its own inclusion in decks vs. proactive cards that always do their thing.”

Q: Would you ever explore the design space for cards that change based on priority (or always have priority)?
A: Glenn “I do believe there’s some design space for cards with “initiative,” but it has a similar issue in that its value is wholly dependent on multiple contexts lining up (good effect and impactful opportunity). That makes the complexity trade less appealing to me in general, though it’s not a dealbreaker.

Plus, lots of effects this might apply to could sometimes be stronger with the potential to reveal second. Killmonger is a good example of a card that’s good first or second in different spots, rewarding skillful play that navigates who flips first.”

Q: Could you implement a catch up mechanic for returning players?
A: Stephen “We are currently building an initial version of bonuses for players coming back to the game after a while. The initial version will have a returning player special login bonus. We will add more features to help returning players over time.”

Q: Is there still interest from the team about making changes to card acquisition and spotlight caches?
A: Stephen “Yes we are working on potential changes. We aren’t ready to share details yet”

Q: Is it intended that rewards shown from Collector’s Reserves seem to disappear after 25 are shown?
A: Stephen “Good eye. We store the history of your last 25 rewards on the track. Beyond that then they revert. This is primarily due to technical performance otherwise we would continue to show the history for a longer length.”

Q: Are there any plans to add personal offers or the vibranium offers to the webshop?
A: Stephen “It’s a short term technical hurdle to pass the information from the game to the webshop. We plan to integrate the newer bundle types into the web shop in a future update.”

Q: Will Second Dinner be at San Diego Comic Con this year?
A: Griffin “No, we won’t be at SDCC this year. Have a blast there, though!”

Q: Has the team considered swapping cards from the new player experience so starter cards have a chance to be reworked?
A: Glenn “Making a change to early Series cards can be highly disruptive to the collections and gameplay of new players, who are still spending time getting familiar with cards that are new to them. It’s not something we aim to engage in lightly or regularly.”

Q: Are Mill decks staying around as is? The deck is unfun to play against.
A: Glenn “Hopefully, the number of cubes you win from the deck helps (it performs pretty poorly).

I don’t intend to create many more cards for this deck in the near future, as it is a narrow and polarizing archetype. But we do want a wide variety of different decks to create homes for different cards and different feelings. Sometimes, what feels fun to one player won’t feel fun to another, but CCGs in particular are usually built to satisfy the widest possible range of player fantasies.”

Q: Why don’t we get unique variants as login rewards anymore?
A: Addison “I won’t speak to the production plans or what we might do in the future, but from my perspective in QA and working in the content pipeline space, PMVs allow easy creation of these types of bonuses that can be manipulated and updated via OTA/Server updates. Special variants require client updates because the asset has to be in the game before we can set it as a reward and are less flexible both in terms of content and scheduling as a result.”

Q: Will the personal shops ever implement showing variants for cards you use more or artists you buy more of?
A: Stephen “Yes we are working on this. We have a super talented data science team working on trying to make the shop smarter to better match each players preferred cards and art styles. There wont be a ‘light switch’ moment but it will continually get better over time.”

Q: What is the team’s favorite movie?
A: Griffin “My personal all-time favorite is The Shawshank Redemption.”

Addison “Fun fact, this is one of our onboarding questions! I looked at my answer from way back when I joined and I thought it was still fairly relevant (minus Banshees being ‘recent’) so I’ll just copy+paste:

‘So much good stuff out there, I’ll say Rashom*on as a classic, Annihilation as a more modern favorite, Dredd as my go-to turn my brain off popcorn movie, and The Banshees of Inishirin as my recent “I loved that movie!” movie.'”

Glenn “I have a lot of favorite movies, but one that’s interestingly related to my work is Moneyball.”

Bella”Twilight and Titanic 😎”

Q: What will the team do about players who still hoard caches to get better rewards in the future?
A: Stephen “We will tie the rewards of hoarding boxes to the current reward table. There will be no benefit to hoarding. We will not ship any major changes to reserves until we can ensure hoarded reserves are based on the current reward table.”

Q: It feels like SNAP in the first five months of 2024 has had more minor and major technical issues that it’s entire prior history.

– missions not refreshing
– multiple hot fixes after a few patches
– in game errors
– patches delayed as often as they are not

I’m curious over what might have caused the change – both out of curiosity and perhaps some concern that this will be the new normal.
A: Addison “Hmmm, this is an interesting question.

The reality is that it’s been a wide range of different ‘things’ that have caused the recent instability. And unfortunately we got hit by several all at once which was…fun.

Some of these are byproducts of old code and features that had weird issues that would cause failures down the road that we just weren’t aware of. The best example is with Spotlight Cache and US Agent’s release. This was a byproduct of a weird bug introduced when the system was first developed that would see the feature fail on week 41…It was one of those things that wasn’t caught because it required specific purchase patterns in the previous week (week 40 in most players’ case) to occur and these types of purchase patterns weren’t something we were doing when testing content hookup week over week and we didn’t have content hooked up (even as placeholder) that far out when the feature was first being tested. As a result, it wasn’t ever seen internally. And when I mean ever, I mean the first instance of this exception happening was on production the day everyone saw it and was followed by thousands almost immediately after.

Other things you list are a byproduct of changing philosophies on what it means to be a liveops title. The increased frequency of hotfixes is the most obvious. In some cases it’s to address content hiccups and whatnot, but we’ve also been frequently deploying client hotfixes (in addition to the backend ones that you all don’t see) to address issues that we might have previously been content living with for a month but are now prioritizing because we don’t want you all to have to live with them for that long. Similarly we’ll often run into an issue late in the testing cycle that we don’t feel safe trying to shoehorn into our initial release candidate and would prefer extended testing time but that we feel is important enough to get out ASAP. All that being said, I know one of my goals for the next year (literally written out in my recent self-review even!) is to reduce the frequency of client hotfixes because they are a tremendously heavy lift on our end and it’d be a better experience for all of you to not have them as well!

You mention underlying engine changes as being a likely source of some recent issues because of previous comments we had made, and you’re absolutely right. In hindsight we should have left it in the oven a little longer but we had some corresponding timing issues that required it go out when it did (Unity was deprecating services for older versions so we had to get onto the new version). At the time though, we (I at least) were relatively confident in the changes and knew there’d be a hit to initial performance when people had to redownload assets but figured it’d resolve pretty quickly for people. It’s just unfortunate that the build we released with that change also coincided with other major issues (like that sweet, sweet Spotlight cache one).

Ultimately, one of our guiding principles is to become ‘LiveOps Wizards’ and while we’ve had some recent stumbling blocks, a lot of the ‘stuff’ behind the scenes that’s been related to those have been in pursuit of that goal. We are always striving to try to deliver content, features, and changes quicker and with higher quality release over release, just sometimes that is easier said than done. As QA, it’s kind of my job to be pessimistic a lot and to assume that the build’s going to fall down and the game’s going to explode, but realistically I’m optimistic that over the next few patches we’ll be able to get back to a reasonably reliable update cadence with far fewer technical hiccups and a more robust feature set to boot!

Thanks for the question, and thanks to yourself and everyone else for being patient with us while we work through these hurdles!”

Questions From You!

Each week, I ask readers of the weekly dev update to leave their questions down in the comment section. That way we can ask those questions on your behalf, or let you know the answers if those questions have been asked before! I read each comment you leave, so I will be adding this section at the end of each week’s edition to highlight your questions that you asked last week!

Q:Is it intended that Blink says “no target” and does nothing, if opponent added Widows bite to my side before Blink revealing?
A: No official answer yet, but sounds like a bug. Always report odd situations like this as a bug in game (in the settings menu) so devs can properly see your specific interaction and make a better comment on it.

Q: Will the 10 booster reward on the CL ever change? It’s quite meaningless after early gameplay.
A: Stephen “We plan to make improvements in the future, but we aren’t ready to share details about it yet.”

Q: Can we get a prestige system that revolves around achievements?
A: A while back, devs mentioned a concept like this, though I can’t find the exact quote. They mentioned challenges like “Have Deadpool reach 100 Power in a match”, so the idea has definitely been floated around before. If I can find that quote or get an new official answer, I will highlight this again in a future edition.

Q: Curious why the “temporary” change to Zabu hasn’t been reverted, now that there are so many good counters in the game?
A: Per the patch notes that nerfed Zabu, this change was intended as a test to see how 4-Cost cards actually perform outside of a meta that relies on Zabu to balance around. We likely won’t see that nerf changed until the team can properly address the 4-Cost issue.

Q: Black krackle is not clear enough during match. Can you make it brighter a little bit so it will be clearer?
A: KentErik “we’ve tried a few things, weren’t happy with the results, and will try some more 🙂”

Keep Your Questions and Feedback Coming!

That’s all for this week’s update! Be sure to check back here at Marvel Snap Zone for next week’s update! If you enjoyed the amount of content in this edition, make sure to keep asking your questions to the developers by submitting it in theirofficial Discordin the “#ask-the-team” channel. If you have questions and don’t use Discord, leave your questions for the developers in the comment section here, and I will make sure your question has been answered by the devs!

If you have feedback or changes you would like to see with these weekly updates, also let us know in the comment section!